L'article 382 Review: A wonderfully awkward vintage French comedy

If you have an hour to spare and love dusty French comedies where everybody talks way too fast, L'article 382 is absolutely worth a watch today. Just don't expect a high-stakes crime thriller, or you'll probably turn it off after ten minutes.

The setup is honestly hilarious. A judge gets mugged in the dark, beats the crap out of the thief, gets his watch back, and then finds out the mugger is actually his boss—the President of the Court of Justice. 😅

I mean, what do you even do in that situation? You can't exactly go to human resources about your boss trying to rob you in a dark alley.

The film doesn't take itself seriously at all. It's much sillier than American legal dramas like Before the Jury or even Behind Jury Doors, which are way more dramatic and serious.

The opening mugging scene is filmed in this incredibly dark alleyway where you can barely see who is hitting who. It's mostly just grunts and the sound of someone getting whacked with what looks like a heavy cane.

When the judge gets home and looks at his recovered watch, he has this massive grin on his face. He's so incredibly proud of himself for beating up a criminal.

But then the next morning at the courthouse, everything goes wrong. He sees his boss walking in with a huge bandage over his eye and a very noticeable limp.

There is this one scene where the judge is just staring at his boss's swollen face during a meeting. The boss is trying to explain away his black eye as a "shaving accident" and the silence lingers so long it becomes funny.

Charles Lemontier plays the boss and he has this incredibly expressive, guilty-looking mustache. Seriously, his mustache does half the acting in this movie.

The print I watched was super grainy, and some of the audio felt like it was recorded inside a tin can. But somehow, that made the cheap office sets feel more real and cozy.

Sometimes the movie just stops to let two characters argue about random French laws. It gets a bit boring during those parts, I won't lie to you.

It's definitely not as intense or gritty as something like The Big House. It's more of a theatrical farce that happens to have judges in it.

The dialogue is super fast, almost like a machine gun. If you don't speak French, you'll be reading subtitles at lightning speed just to keep up with the gossip.

There's also a side plot with Simone Bourday, but she mostly just stands around looking confused by all the men. I wish they gave her more to do, honestly, as she seemed like the only sane person in the room.

The ending comes up incredibly fast. It feels like they just ran out of story or budget and decided to roll the credits right there.

But honestly? It's a fun little vintage oddity that deserves a bit of love if you can track down a copy.